[Brig. Gen. Mark T. Kimmitt, USA (Ret.)] said that “the support of the American people is the center of gravity for the next ten years” — a interesting indication of how long he believes the U.S. will be involved in Afghanistan. Asked about possible frustration on the part of the military with the amount of time being taken by the Obama administration to decide on a new strategy, Gen. Kimmitt defended the pace of the administration’s decision-making process.

Sam Stein reports that former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.), a likely 2012 presidential candidate who can be counted on to say the most politically opportunistic, disagreed with Kimmitt and characterized the Obama administration’s deliberation as “Hamlet in the White House,” its overall policy stemming “from the sense that is growing in a lot of foreign policy circles that America is in decline.”

No real surprises are coming out of the conference. But FPI was created, almost expressly, to be a loyal opposition group bucking up the administration on the war in Afghanistan as the popular of that war slackens. The sudden arrival of predictable liberal-bashing seems to be swallowing up the message.

“I thought the vote would be a little closer,” said Perkins. “I think that this nomination is a threat to our whole understanding of American law. But this is typical of this administration, and there’s probably more to come. I think their approach to public policy is like a food fight, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, as people are dodging and ducking.”

After this I heard Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy address the launch meeting of the new Sovereignty Caucus, where he talked about Koh. “Harold Koh is one of the enemies,” he said, “if that’s not too charged a word, one of the enemies of sovereignty.”

A campaign that delayed Koh’s confirmation by several months will almost certainly come to an end shortly.

UPDATE: Koh was confirmed by the full Senate, 62-35.

Protesters in Tehran on Monday (Flickr: .faramarz)

Before voters went to the polls in Friday’s elections in Iran, critics of President Obama’s Iran policy — and of his outreach to the Middle East in general — attempted to pre-empt the possible defeat of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by pronouncing it meaningless. John Bolton, the former United Nations Ambassador for George W. Bush, warned that a victory for the president’s chief opponent Mir Hossein Moussavi would “not change the fundamental direction of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs or its support for terrorism.” Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum, wrote that he was “rooting for Ahmadinejad” because it would be “better to have a bellicose, apocalyptic, in-your-face Ahmadinejad who scares the world than a sweet-talking Mousavi who again lulls it to sleep.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

But in the wake of the contested election and the surging rallies against Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs who rule Iran, the president’s more hawkish critics are changing the tune. The president, they argue, has an opening — if not a responsibility — to make a statement on the elections that aligns the United States with reformist elements inside of Iran. Monday began with a few disconnected critiques of the president’s silence, and ended with calls for a bold Obama statement from leading neoconservatives and one of the Republican Party’s most prominent leaders in the House.

“The president should be questioning the legitimacy of the elections,” said Kim Holmes, former assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration who is now vice president of foreign policy and defense studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “He doesn’t need to go into any great detail. He needs to show that, in the long run, the United States is on the side of the Iranian people.”

Critics of the Obama White House are very much aware of the fears that have, up to now, forestalled a statement from the president. As one official told TWI over the weekend, there is great caution about appearing to favor one side over another. On Monday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs would only say that there was “concern” about the election results and that “Iranians are looking into this.” After news that one man had been killed at a massive Tehran rally, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly would only say that the administration was “deeply troubled” by events. At the end of the day, the president responded to events with a four minute-long statement that recognized the nation’s “sovereignty,” credited the nation with “looking into” the election results, and pleased few critics of Iran.

“Why would a statement supporting the freedom of the Iranian people undermine the movement?” asked Michael Ledeen, the freedom scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies whose books about Iran include “The Iranian Time Bomb” and “Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West.” Ledeen, like many critics of the official stance, framed the choice as a moral one. “Would a statement supporting the mullahs strengthen the opposition? Ridiculous. If America stands for anything it stands for freedom. We should have supported the Iranian people a long time ago. The current silence from the White House is shameful.”

Some pro-Iranian activists have disagreed with this sentiment and portrayed the administration’s silence as unfortunate but politically necessary. Over the weekend, Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council told TWI that an Obama statement might allow Iran’s leaders to portray the unrest as a Western conspiracy. But Ledeen dismissed the spokesman and the argument. “Trita Parsi is not a human rights activist,” Ledeen said. “He’s a leading apologist for the regime.”

Other critics of the Obama administration have called for a statement in a more subtle manner. Early on Monday morning, Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, urged fellow conservatives to temper their criticism and try to make their case to the president. “We should hope Obama does the right thing,” he wrote at his magazine’s website, “and urge and pressure him to do so.” Hours later, in The Washington Post, Kristol drew comparisons between the situation in Iran and the run-up to World War II and argued that dissidents could be helped by a speech “for liberty” coming from “the popular and credible speaker-to-the-Muslim-world, Barack Obama.”

Pipes, the controversial scholar who had rooted for an outright Ahmadinejad victory until the votes came in, called the uncertain result “the best result possible” and said that the apparent win represented “a slap in the face of the American president’s pro-Islamist policies.” Reached on Monday by TWI, he, too, suggested that the president could further American interests by taking a side. “This is the moment for the outside world to let the Iranian people know they are not alone by manifesting its rejection of Khamene’i's despotic rule,” said Pipes. “The U.S. government should side with the Iranian people and the opposition forces.”

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) (WDCpix)

All of this — and a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll that found 66 percent of Americans calling the administration “not tough enough” on Iran — have loosened the tongues of Hill Republicans. Early on Monday, the most prominent congressional statement on Iran and the American response came from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who called the election a “mockery of democracy” and expressed “hope that President Obama and members of both parties in Congress will speak out.” Republican comments were somewhat muted until a mid-day appearance by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in which the 2008 presidential candidate suggested that the president “speak out strongly in opposition” to Ahmadinejad. At 5 p.m. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House Republican whip who has frequently criticized candidate and then President Obama over his policies toward Israel and Iran, released a statement attacking “the Administration’s silence in the face of Iran’s brutal suppression of democratic rights” and labeling it “a step backwards for homegrown democracy in the Mideast.”

“President Obama must take a strong public position in the face of violence and human rights abuses,” said Cantor. “We have a moral responsibility to lead in opposition to Iran’s extreme response to peaceful protests.”

All of this has given the president’s critics some optimism, the hope that the president could be drawn into making a clear statement on Iran, edging away from what Republicans had termed an “apology tour” to hostile nations. Watching the surge of liberal and left-leaning activism in support of Iran’s protesters, some of the long-time opponents of the Mullahs are starting to see the possibility of a breakthrough, of an issue that had been partisan becoming more mainstream.

“I’m delighted if people on the left call for supporting the Iranian people,” said Ledeen. “They should have been doing it all these years. Ahem.”

More often it rewards those who arrive on the battlefield “the fustest with the mostest,” as Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest once put it. If Mr. Gates has his way, U.S. forces will find it increasingly hard to meet the Forrest standard.

Um.

Beyond that, Schmitt and Donnelly argue for a continuation of most of the programs Gates is cutting, and do so through some curious omissions and outright misstatements. The alternative to the F-22 Raptor jet is  apparently “the 660 F-15s flying today, but which are literally falling apart at the seams from age and use” — not the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that Gates and the generals are actually advocating as a replacement. Stopping the Army’s Future Combat Systems vehicle-modernization program means “future generations of soldiers will conduct mounted operations in the M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles designed in the 1970s,” even though Gates said on Monday that he’s going to “reevaluate the requirements, technology and approach and then re-launch the Army’s vehicle modernization program.” And Gates is somehow “cap[ping] the size of the U.S. ground force,” even though Gates is seeking an extra $11 billion to expand the Army and Marine Corps. (I suppose, to be charitable, they could mean they want an even larger ground force, but that’s hardly clear from the op-ed, which implies that Gates is resisting the very expansion he’s funding.)

Basically, Donnelly and Schmitt’s real beef is that Gates’ budget gets rid of the dry rot in the Pentagon and presumes that the military can’t fund all things for all conceivable threats. As Gates put it:

It is important to remember that every Defense dollar spent to overinsure against a remote or diminishing risk or, in effect, to run up the score in capability where the United States is already dominant is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable. That is a risk I will not take.

American dominance is not so fragile that trading planes is going to eliminate it. But I guess taking advice from Klan leaders leads to all sorts of paranoia.

–

TWI is on Twitter. Please Follow us here.